As his kickstarter campaign (#KickStartLoka) continues to garner support from the industry, some of the who’s who of food in this city are telling you to pay attention to Dave Mottershall. And you should be.

Last Sunday, protesters gathered to oppose a potential Loblaws location adjacent to Kensington Market. Tension in the neighbourhood has been running high since the monks at the Zen Budhist Temple put a very valuable piece of College St. real estate on the market. The rumour mill started buzzing in no time, and the news of a potential 15-storey condo development and Loblaws complex emerged shortly afterwards.
Here’s my take.

A few months back I was flicking through some Netflix titles and catching up on some TED Talks I’d bookmarked and been meaning to watch. Naturally, it didn’t take long to stumble accross the “Chew On This” series, which aims to explore some of the economic, environmental, and health related facets of modern food culture and agriculture. While skimming through the list of speakers which Netflix has opted to include in this particular series, names like Jamie Oliver and Mark Bittman were the first to jump out at me since I’ve been following their work since as long as I’ve been interested in food. Surprisingly, it was a lesser known name that really caught my eye and and made me take notice, though. That name was Graham Hill’s. As it turns out, Graham Hill is the creator of Treehugger.com, a blog of which I am a frequent reader, and a site I’d certainly recommend to anyone else reading this.

David Chang is undeniably one of the biggest names in food right now. The New York based chef and captain of the burgeoning Momofuku empire recently announced that he would be opening the doors to not one, but two adjoined locations here in Toronto. While Toronto is home to its fair share of restaurants manned by celebrity chefs – Scott Conant, Lynn Crawford, and Susur Lee are all currently running restaurants here – Chang is arguably the biggest name to date to establish a presence. So, what does this all mean for Toronto?

Toronto’s undisputed king of underground taco fare, La Carnita, is a bit of an anomaly in the food world. They don’t run a restaurant. They don’t have an industrial kitchen. There aren’t even any trained chefs manning the helm. But what Andrew Richmond, the driving force behind La Carnita’s success, does possess is a solid grasp on how the web savvy and hungry of this city like to eat and socialize. Richmond, a graphic designer by trade, has certainly stumbled onto something pretty special in his budding La Carnita enterprise.

I finally got around to trying out Brooklyn based Five Leaves Cafe’s recipe for their chopped kale salad earlier today, and it definitely did not disappoint. GQ featured this recipe in their most recent issue, and after a quick bit of precursory Googling I can see that some fellow food bloggers out there have also shown this dish some love (and for good reason). Much like my last post, this is a great dish that takes advantage of winter produce that you can find fresh and locally grown right now here in Southern Ontario.

I am a big fan of eating seasonally inspired foods, so I have spent a lot of time lately tinkering around with some hearty dishes that seem to help fight off winter’s chill from the inside out. Whenever I get into autumn and winter cooking mode, it doesn’t take long for my craving for great soup to kick in. Here’s a recipe that stands out as exactly that.